January 2020

Jan 31, 2020

Probably one that is impossible to do as a plein air - continual looking up at the subject then looking down to paint. Not sure. A bit of an experiment just painting the facade of this old building in Libourne South West France.

Jan 29, 2020

Weekly sketch night at my art society, the 'Bristol Savages', and the topic for the night was "Grand designs on land sea and air". So we have 2 hours to produce a painting based on that topic without the use of any reference material (so no cheating looking up on the web).

Jan 25, 2020

The plaza del Obispo in Malaga, right next to Malaga Cathedral. A striking yellowish building which as a colour always looks great against blue. Kept things fairly loose in the shadows on the left, where there's a row of shops with things for sale on displays on the street. Also a bit of simplification of the architectural details of the cathedral facade on the right.

Jan 22, 2020

Probably keeping to my formula of bands of light and dark down a painting made fairly easy here in this scene from Albufeira, a tourist resort in Southern Portugal. Then I use objects to join up the bands - for example the figure under the shade of the tree and some posts on the left to connect with the middle ground and so on.

Jan 21, 2020

This is a recent video (new tutorial coming soon!) where I test drive a Nano Mister. They're used in the beauty industry and produce a very fine mist. So worth a go as I found my normal mister produced little droplets on the paper rather than producing a consistent layer of water...

Jan 20, 2020

A couple of paintings from a weekend workshop I ran in Bristol. Two very different scenes that we all attempted - Winchester and Vernazza. I think a good format for the workshops I run is that I normally complete 2 demos in the day. Attendees paint along with me, as in, I first do my drawing, then attendees do their drawings of the same scene, I do the first wash and then attendees do the wash and so on. It seems to work well.